1. Technical Field
This disclosure relates generally to direct memory access (DMA), and more particularly to apparatus, devices, methods, and processors for dynamically administering DMA buffers.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, mobile devices such as smart phones and tablet computers have become increasingly sophisticated. In addition to supporting telephone calls, many mobile devices now provide access to the internet, email, text messaging, and navigation using the global positioning system (GPS). Mobile devices that support such sophisticated functionality often include many components. In such mobile devices, a processor of the mobile device may be configured with a number of DMA engines, each which may be configured to couple the main memory to a component of the mobile device for out-of-band DMA transmission between the main memory and component. In mobile devices and other systems of the prior art, each such DMA engine is typically identical to the others and includes some local memory storage that supports DMA transmissions. Further such local storage is generally implemented with area and power consuming DQ flip-flops or the like. In many systems, however, each DMA engine is not utilized equally. As such, the local memory storage of many DMA engines is often underutilized causing an inefficient utilization of memory and power consumption.